This year on Passion/Palm Sunday, the Common Lectionary assigns almost all of Matthew's passion narrative (Matthew 26:14-27:66) as the Gospel text. Instead of haphazardly skipping through that tremendous amount of material, we have chosen to focus on two disturbing and poignant moments within this climactic reading.

Matthew 26:14-16 and 27:3-10 give special insight into the motives and mistakes of the disciple Judas Iscariot. Matthew provides us with a fuller glimpse into Judas' mind and soul than do any of the other Gospel accounts. All single Judas out as the consummate betrayer. But only Matthew returns to him after Jesus' arrest to reveal his fate. (Acts, of course, does carry a slightly different version.)

Jesus' identity as the prophetically predicted deliverer is one of Matthew's mo…